


Landslide

by gonetoarcadia



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aging, Established Relationship, F/M, Goodbyes, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonetoarcadia/pseuds/gonetoarcadia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ups and downs of Pepper Potts and Tony Stark over the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landslide

**Author's Note:**

> _Well, I've been afraid of changin'_   
>  _'Cause I built my life around you_   
>  _But time makes you bolder_   
>  _Children get older_   
>  _I'm getting older too_
> 
>       - Landslide by Fleetwood Mac

Pepper Potts turns forty on a quiet Sunday night. The terrace under her shoes and the balcony under her hands are solid as a chill wind blows her hair around her face and the lights of all New York are laid out below her, at her feet. Time whispers by like satin against her skin, and somewhere behind her a number ticks from zero to one.

Breathing in slowly, Pepper looks up instead of down. Stars in New York are farfetched on the best of nights, and tonight there are dark grey clouds scudding against the pale and thin sliver of a moon. The wind whips a little harder, and Pepper reaches up to tuck pale hair back behind her ear. Somewhere up there satellites are circling the earth, seeing the planet as a glittering ball hung like a children’s toy in the vastness of space. Somewhere down here is Pepper Potts, wondering if that’s all it is.

The clock numbers change again, and a second later the phone rings.

“Potts.”

“Tony,” she returns easily, eyes still tracing where the moon should be.

“You had better be at your celebration, partying like it’s 1999.”

“I am,” she lies easily, her lips turning up in a faint smile. “I just stepped out for a moment to get some air.”

“Good. Then I get to be the first one to wish you happy birthday. Do you like the catering? I went with that place you like, although I have to say, Potts, your taste does not run cheap.”

“It’s perfect,” she assures him, because she’s sure it is. If only because there are enough assistants between the two of them to ensure it. “Thank you, Tony.”

“Good. I’m on my way. Assuming these idiots can handle themselves alone for fifteen minutes – do we have fire insurance over here? We might need it, these children are hazards, I swear. Assuming they don’t burn down the building I should be there around two.”

“I’ll see you then,” she answers steadily, knowing that he won’t be.

There’s a beat of silence, and then-

“See you soon, Potts.”

“I love you too, Tony.” She does.

She stands in the quiet for another few minutes after he’s gone, and when the moon shows no signs of reappearing she turns on her heel and walks carefully back into the dark penthouse suite.

There are no more phone calls that night. Forty, and there’s nobody else.  
  


* * *

  
She’s in her office when Tony Stark dies. In the space of a heartbeat her life changes forever, and it happens while she’s adding up figures a sixth grader could have handled.

There’s never enough time to do all the paperwork that needs doing, especially not when Tony has a habit of blowing it off and arranging it so that it ends up back on her desk, conveniently unsigned. People think that heading a company like Stark Industries is a glamorous job, and sometimes it is. She wears crisp, dark suits and sky-high heels for a reason. But a lot of the time it’s just exhausting and mindlessly repetitive, and sometimes she really thinks she should see about reassigning her job to JARVIS.

So Pepper’s going through the quarterly fiscal statements with a red pen, accidentally staining her hand when Tony Stark, Iron Man, falls out of the sky and leaves a crater in a northern neighbourhood of Washington DC, changing the world forever.

The phone rings and Pepper reaches for it without thinking, numbers flitting through her head as she taps her pen thoughtfully.  
  


* * *

  
She’s twenty nine, and her best friend is organizing a Christmas holiday.

“Mexico. Come on, Pepper, we’re all going. You love Mexico”

Katie Reese is brilliantly competent and sharp as a tack. They went to NYU together, and Katie is a rising star at a local union. She spends her nights off reigning over the club scene with an iron fist, and her group of friends is family, an assortment of people she’s known her entire life. Pepper loves her like a sister but can’t relate at all.

“I wish I could, but I just can’t. My boss’ schedule is crazy next week, and I’m reasonably sure that if I try to take it off he’ll quite literally forget to breathe and die.”

Katie laughs, a little breathless, and she fixes Pepper with steady green eyes and a twitch of her lips.

“I wish the New York Times could hear you say that.”

“The million and a half confidentiality clauses I’ve signed say otherwise.”

“It doesn’t even have to be a week,” Katie practically begs. “Just a few days. A weekend. Stark won’t asphyxiate on his own tie in two days.”

He might.

Pepper bites her lip and shakes her head. Katie’s smile gets a little cooler.  
  


* * *

  
He steps off the plane, and Pepper has to do her best not to cry because people are watching, because Tony doesn’t deserve to see her cry, that ass. If she blinks, the tears will be running down her cheeks, so she stares resolutely ahead and finds herself smiling. The twist of conflicting emotions is ridiculous, but all she can think is that _Tony’s back, he’s alive_. She grips the folio in her hands a little tighter as he walks towards her, bruised and battered but breathing. Bruised and battered but here, with her. He fixes her with an unusually serious look, and for one rare moment she feels like he’s just paying attention to her, her and no one else.

“Tears for your long lost boss?”

“Tears of joy. I hate job hunting.”

They kept her on payroll for the show of the thing, a gesture demonstrating the (fake) conviction that Tony was alive and coming back. She’s spent her afternoons organizing and reorganizing his office while trying to think of what to do with her evenings. She spent most of those lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering if she’d ever be late to another meeting again.

“Yeah, well, vacation’s over.”

Tony’s eyes shift slightly, and then they’re heading for the car while Rhodey is whisked away for a debriefing. Pepper blinks and wipes quickly at her eyes.  
  


* * *

  
It’s a week after her 37th birthday and Pepper is laughing harder than she can remember doing in… years. At least.

“You can’t be serious. He really did that?”

“Aye, it was something to behold. Seeing friend Tony take out half of the villains on his own was most impressive, but watching him do the same to himself was somehow even more so.”

There’s a blond god sitting across from her, dazzling in his very existence, and he’s describing with his hands how Tony had overshot a mark and gone straight into a pole, knocking himself into a store front where several cans of paint promptly exploded.

“I don’t know why you’re laughing, do you know how long it took to get that off? Valuable hours, Pepper! I could have been at a board meeting. Hell, I could have been drinking.”

Steve leans over and puts an elbow on Tony’s shoulder (emphasizing the height difference, Pepper notes with a giggle), and shakes his head with a grin.

“And you make fun of me for being red, white and blue, Stark. Maybe we can make you your own flag in pink and green to match.”

“I hate you all,” Tony declares to the room in general, but his eyes find Pepper’s and there’s a strange, anomalous glow of pride in them. She smiles back at him, and her hand finds his under the table.  
  


* * *

  
She’s writing a memo, and it’s her first week on the job. Her boss is young and stupid and a genius and absolutely terrifying. He’s also three hours late.

When he breezes into the office twenty minutes later, there are dark circles under his eyes and he snaps at Pepper like she’s a drone who should leap to attention.

“You. Take a memo.” He doesn’t know her name yet, probably never will from what she’s heard. Pepper scrambles for a piece of paper and a pen.

“Yes, sir.”

He starts dictating something and she only understands one word in three, and her hand shakes a little but her shoulders and chin remain firm. When he’s done he waltzes off to see a woman in a skirt that resembles a censor bar more than anything else, and Pepper wonders if a week in is too early to hand in her two-week’s notice.  
  


* * *

  
The room is dark and quiet when he steps into it, faint strains of Ella Fitzgerald illuminating the silence more than breaking it. Pepper’s sitting at the bar, and there are tears on her cheeks. When she turns her head to see him standing there, she quickly tries to wipe them away but has to abandon the effort as futile, taking a drink from her martini glass instead.

“Pepper.”

“I’m sorry, Tony. I’m sorry I just can’t do this. I can’t be everything for you. I can’t.”

She looks up at him, and the shine of the light from the bar on her face takes his breath away, but she knows that already. She knows he loves her, and she knows that he’d give up anything and everything to keep her. That’s why she can feel jagged little pieces of her heart pricking and cutting from the inside of her chest.

“I never wanted you to.”

He looks desolate, hopeful and resigned all at once. Pepper has to tip her head so that her bangs fall across her eyes, because he’s looking for the stars there and all he’ll find is clouds across the empty sky.

“I used to want to have kids, you know. When I was younger. I used to dream about having a little girl whose hair I could brush, and who I could sing to when she went to sleep.”

She doesn’t know how he gets from across the room to the stool beside hers, but he’s there and there’s a slash of something she can’t name written across his face.

“Is that what it is? I mean – if that’s what it takes…”

“No! No.” The exclamation is abrupt and she snatches her hand away when he reaches for it. “You have so many responsibilities, so many people who count on you. You’re always risking your life. How could I ever ask more of you? How could I ever add one more person to worry about, one more person to stay up all night wondering if you’ll ever come back?”

“They don’t need me,” he tells her roughly, and his eyes are still tracing her face, she can feel them. “They’ve got others now, they don’t need me.”

When Pepper finally turns her head to look at him she knows he’s being sincere.

“We all need you, Tony. I’m just so tired of being one in a million.”

There’s silence for a long time after that, but when he reaches for her hand again she lets him take it. The feel of his thumb stroking over the back of her hand is warm and reassuring, but there’s no real reassurance to be had.

Time ticks slowly forward, playing through the intertwine of their fingers.  
  


* * *

  
“Where’d you get that dress?”

“It was a birthday present… from you, actually.”

“I’ve got great taste, don’t I?”  
  


* * *

  
She’s dressed in black and grey, and although one might expect nature to pull out all the stops, all the melodrama just for him, instead it’s a cold, sunny day. There was a state funeral, of course, and half of New York turned out. They owed him that much. But the real one, the one where everyone who really loved him is there, that one is small and quiet, and Pepper stands with her hands clasped and her head down.

Captain Steve Rogers, Doctor Banner and Natasha are there, but they’re the only ones left. She supposes Thor would be here if he could, but Clint left them years ago. Happy and Colonel Rhodes are quiet on the other side.

As the man leading the service talks on, Pepper thinks about the wind on her cheek and the fact that her hair’s half grey these days. (She rather vainly stopped colouring it after Tony told her he liked the way it caught the light.) She thinks about the fact that you can’t see the stars in New York, and that in a month she’s turning fifty. She thinks about the leaves tumbling across the green sod and how cold it must be in the earth. The simple granite headstone sits apart from the others in the small cemetery, and for a moment Pepper is proud of having fought so hard to have him here where he belongs instead of with his parents.

The ceremony – if that’s what it is – ends, and they each take a turn sprinkling dirt over the top of the coffin. Pepper is the very last, and she’s surprised to find no tears on her cheeks when she does it. Rogers – Steve – and Natasha move to her, and the three of them leave with Happy and Rhodey, en route to a party where they’re going to celebrate through the night in the honor of a man who changed them all irrevocably, for worse and always for better.

(Bruce apologizes to her privately beforehand, under a mostly bare tree whose branches bowed and shook slightly. Pepper understands, and she smiles at him as he leaves them to go his own way.)

Between the moments, between farewells and remembering, Pepper lets the others go ahead while she kneels to the newly engraved stone, not minding that her pantyhose is getting dirty.

“Like it’s 1999, I promise,” she says, smiling to herself. And then she impulsively kisses the granite and finally – finally – feels the tears well up. “I’ll see you soon.”

And then she gets up and walks away. Pepper Potts has known Tony Stark for over half her life, and there’s a spot next to him waiting for the day when it’s her turn to lay down the burden and let the world count on someone else. She’ll be back, but not yet.  
  


* * *

  
“What are you doing, Potts?”

“You would not believe how difficult it is to change a light bulb in here.”

She’s standing on the counter of their kitchen, her heels lying beside her as she attempts for the fifth time to unscrew the fixture that has been giving her unnecessary grief for a half hour. Tony grins at her as he walks towards the counter, and she shoots him an unimpressed look to let him know that she isn’t being ridiculous, this is so much more difficult than it needs to be.

“What do you think, JARVIS, should we help the lady?”

“I think, sir,” answers JARVIS’s always sardonic voice, “that it may be better if you left matters in her capable hands.”

“Thanks, honey, I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

Pepper laughs as she finally manages to get the fixture off, and she bends to put it down next to her shoes before she stands again and handily unscrews the problem bulb.

“There. Now hand me the other one and don’t look up my skirt.”

“You take the fun out of everything.”

He hands the light bulb up, and Pepper only takes a minute to put it where it belongs. The fixture takes another few minutes of fiddling to set right, but she’s figured out the knack of it now and it only takes two tries this time.

“Really, Tony, why do you have to make everything so complicated?” she asks as she starts to get down. He quickly moves towards her, and as his hands go to her waist while hers go to his shoulders, she lets herself free-fall into him.

“Just as complicated as it should be,” he assures her with a wide smile, and she knows that there’s nothing in the world that he’s looking at then but her.

“Is that so, Mr. Stark?” she murmurs, because his dark eyes are lovely and his mouth is so close.

“Indeed, Ms. Potts,” he replies, playing it straight for one whole second, and then she’s gasping in surprise as he – literally – sweeps her off her feet. “Now, shall we go find out what other complicated things I’m good at?”

They make it halfway out of the room before Pepper makes him go back for her shoes, and it’s with those in hand that they stumble upstairs in a bubble of warm laughter while the lights quietly close off behind them.

There’s a quiet sigh as the clock changes from seven to eight.


End file.
